Justin Sun’s Open Letter to the Community on TRON’s New Vision and the Launch of BitTorrent Chain
Dear fellow Tronics, developers, token holders, and friends who have been following TRON’s growth,
It’s been a while since I wrote my last open letter to the community. In this letter, I’d like to share some of my personal thoughts on the future of the TRON protocol. This move was made after careful deliberation and evaluation of the future of the blockchain industry. I, therefore, have huge faith in this decision and will go all in to execute this plan with full commitment.
Following its launch by the TRON Super Representative committee on June 25, 2018, the TRON protocol, three years into its inception, has grown into a network that handles transfer volume averaging over $10 billion every day, and a blockchain settlement protocol that exists side by side with Ethereum. Total assets on the TRON blockchain have ballooned over $50 billion, and the total value locked in TRON decentralized financial programs has surpassed $10 billion. Behind these achievements is the community-led decentralized autonomous organization(DAO). We succeeded in offering a business service and social benefits, similar to that of Alipay and Paypal, yet in a non-monopolized, DAO, and decentralized approach.
As the founder, I am pleased to see that TRON, handling five times the daily transfer volume of Paypal, has demonstrated the potential in becoming a global settlement layer for humankind in the future. This is the new vision that the TRON protocol takes on. Today, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication or SWIFT sits at the core of the global settlement and provides a network that enables all financial institutions worldwide to send and receive information about financial transactions. However, the 48-year old financial telecommunication model fails to keep pace with the development of the Internet and has caused the world’s financial industry tremendous extra costs for its compromised efficiency. And it is even far from possible to build the protocol into an intelligent Web 3 standard that features interoperability and open-source. The obsolete protocol SWIFT born in the last century is nowhere close to swift, which reminds me of Voltaire’s remark on the Holy Roman Empire: “The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.”
It is an opportunity bestowed by the time to have blockchain overtake SWIFT protocol and serve as the world’s future global settlement layer. It is also an opportunity as well as a duty for the TRON protocol to provide humankind a smart financial protocol that offers lower fees and low latency. This new protocol will not only enable society to run fast settlements at a fraction of the current costs. More importantly, smart operating systems of the Internet era can iterate quickly, offer interoperability, and hold enormous growth potential, as evidenced by the blooming decentralized finance (Defi) and non-fungible token (NFT).
Positioned as a global settlement layer, Layer 1 of the TRON protocol will focus on providing secure and fast settlement services at lower fees for financial institutions, crypto assets, and decentralized finance. In the meantime, the TRON protocol will soon launch BitTorrent Chain, a Layer 2 scaling and cross-chain solution, and migrate TRON’s DeFi, NFT, DAPP, and other emerging blockchains onto Layer 2 and cross-chain solutions.
First, we’re entering into an era of fully connected chains where the industry is themed on inclusiveness. Blockchain networks in the future will not be segregated, as in the TRON network, Ethereum network, or BSC Network, but instead they will exist as a whole under one common name — blockchain. Barriers among different blockchain networks will be knocked down, as homogeneous and heterogeneous ones need to communicate with each other. As the first scalable heterogeneous cross-chain interoperability protocol in the blockchain space, BitTorrent Chain or BTTC, will support and be compatible with TRON, Ethereum, and Binance Smart Chain (BSC) upon its release. In other words, with the help of BitTorrent Chain, users are able to transfer mainstream assets among TRON, Ethereum, and BSC in a decentralized manner without any limit. In the near future, BitTorrent Chain will be compatible with more public chains, fulfilling the mission of connecting all chains.
Second, complete compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is taking shape as a unified standard for cross-chain protocols. We must embrace this standard, as it is destined to be the future trend. As a layer 2 network that is compatible with both the TRON and Ethereum protocols, BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) features full compatibility with EVM. All EVM developers are allowed to easily migrate their Ethereum-based applications fully onto BitTorrent Chain to provide superior scalability for the Ethereum network. In the meantime, TRON has as of now invested a total of $450 million in DeFi mining, and will go the extra mile to join in the arms race of EVM public chain by shelling out $1 billion to spur the migration of more projects from Ethereum to BitTorrent Chain (BTTC).
Third, BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) is fully decentralized. Similar to that on the TRON protocol, a Super Representative election among BTTC nodes will be initiated on the TRON blockchain, where everyone can take part and BTT holders can cast their votes to earn staking rewards. It is worth noting that only a limited number of spots are available for the election, which will be ended once the upper limit is reached. Users can earn BTT rewards and participate in community governance once they become the Super Representatives on the network.
All in all, the upcoming BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) will be a cross-chain scaling solution that interconnects TRON, Ethereum, and BSC. On top of providing global mainstream blockchains with practical scaling solutions, more importantly, it will deliver heterogeneous cross-chain communication that is decentralized and free of trust, ushering in a new era of “connecting all chains”.
With the birth of BTTC on October 30, 2021, TRON will by then form a closed loop of both layer 1 and 2 networks with sound cross-chain connectivity. By integrating both a robust underlying network of global settlement layer, and a heterogeneous, scalable cross-chain network BitTorrent Chain that features high throughput and full compatibility with EVM, the TRON network enables smooth communication with the world’s top layer 1 networks such as Ethereum and BSC. Starting today, we will begin developers and community preparation for BTTC. I earnestly welcome the participation of each one of you from both TRON and the broader blockchain community. Together, let us unveil the next brilliant chapter of TRON and the blockchain space as a whole.
Justin Sun
September 3, 2021
